Chapter 12 The Anchor Holds
The Anchor Holds
Daphne & Phonos
Many years ago, before my gift had ever come to me, I’d sometimes sit on the bank of the river that ran past Dodona.
I’d lie with my face inches from the water, watching the clusters of frog spawn.
The tiny specks of life held perfectly still in their clear prison, waiting for a signal I couldn’t see.
They weren’t alive, but they weren’t dead. They were potential.
Today, I was floating just like they had.
A thick, buoyant quiet enveloped what was left of me.
I had become a formless awareness preserved in seemingly limitless dark space.
The constant pain of the threads had vanished.
The weight of a thousand futures had lifted.
An eerie peace settled, a stillness so absolute it felt like a physical embrace.
“Where am I?”
A resonance vibrated through the dark, a presence that felt like the inevitable turn of a tide. “You are with us.”
If I’d had a mouth to move, I might have gasped. This was water. I was in the lake. The Acheron. “What am I doing here?”
“You are waiting,” the lake answered. A simple response that told me much too little.
“Waiting for what? What happened?”
The moment I said the words, I remembered. Finding Callista. The flash of green from the dark canal. The surreal sight of those serpentine eyes. Then… Pure nothing.
Perhaps it should have shocked me, but a part of me had always wondered if one day, I’d black out and never wake up again. Now, I finally had my answer. “I’m dead.”
A deep, ancient amusement rippled through the water. “Are you?”
Before I could process the question, the space around me flickered. The darkness thinned, and an echo from the world above bled through, faint and distorted.
An arrow of familiar power shot forward and snapped against an unbreakable barrier. I mentally flinched at the distinctive sound of breaking bones.
Someone was hurting themselves. Someone I knew.
The person was coming closer and closer to the water, their presence so familiar I could almost feel it on my skin. I reached out, wanting nothing more than to heal their pain.
“You are still so kind, little seer,” the lake said, and moved with me.
The mysterious man’s injuries healed, and just like that, he disappeared from my reach. A part of me felt a keen sense of loss. Where had he gone?
Then, I heard them. The distant ripples of voices resonated in my mind, crisper than they should have been.
“...your sisters. Your House. Yourself. Is that the legacy you wish to leave for the one you grieve?”
I’d only heard that voice once, at the bride auction, but I could never have forgotten its distinctive, ancient tone. It belonged to the sphinx. Phix.
When Phix got her answer, so did I.
“Always one for riddles, Phix. But this time, you know nothing. You do not even understand the meaning of grief.”
It was him. Phonos. My mate. He was the one hurting, breaking, suffering, and still reaching for me. Of course. Who else could it have been?
“He doesn’t understand,” the lake told me, “not yet. He’s always sought easy answers for his problems. In a way, so have you. But nothing in Asphodelia has ever been easy.”
I bristled, outrage bubbling through my suspended consciousness. If I didn’t understand hardship, who did? I’d crawled bleeding and screaming through the ruins of my own sanity, and still had nothing to show for it.
But something silenced my tongue, and it wasn’t the fact that, technically, it didn’t exist. There was a layer of deep meaning in the lake’s words, something that kept me from dismissing its wisdom entirely.
Somewhere in the distance, the sharp edges of Phonos’s grief grated against the silence. I could feel every torn feather, every line of wrongness in the flow of his death energy. Why? The question tormented me, and there were no easy answers.
The lake water went blurry again, and new voices came through, clearer this time, closer.
“Are you sure about this, Father?” Aion asked, an edge of concern cracking his usually mellow voice.
“As sure as I can be. That girl… She deserved better.”
It was Charon, and for whatever reason, he wanted to help me. The unexpected sentiment flowed through my awareness, a strange, formless current of regret.
“The lake…” Aion insisted. “Won’t it be angry with you?”
“If the lake were angry, we’d know it,” Charon shot back with the certainty of a man who’d led countless souls to their damnation. “She is still there, waiting. The Acheron always knows best. It is always certain.”
Certain.
The word echoed into my mind, lifting the fog from my memories. The blackness around me dissolved, and the hard stone of the Stygian Dock materialized beneath my phantom form.
A sudden pressure bloomed on my face. It was the weight of four ancient coins, two against my eyelids, one on my lips, one over my heart. I was back at the ritual where the Ferryman had freed me from my gift.
Charon leaned over me, and his question seemed to reach inside me and squeeze. “Are you certain?”
The realization hit me as hard as my visions once had. Back then, I’d feared he was testing my resolve. But he’d never been talking to me. He had been speaking to the Acheron.
“Very clever, Daphne,” the lake murmured. “You’ve always been both clever and brave. But we wonder… Are you brave enough for this?”
Before I could form an answer, a force of world-breaking power tore through the Acheron’s hold on me. It was a wave of pure, familiar music, the brutal but soft melody that had always brought me such comfort. Phonos’s screech. His soul song.
Phonos’s voice dissolved the endless space around me, and just like that, I could see. But the sight that greeted my eyes wasn’t one I’d expected.
Phonos I’d expected to find. His screech had told me so. Charon’s presence wasn’t that surprising, either. His earlier conversation with Aion had suggested he’d been trying to help me.
But there was something there, between them, a creature I could only stare at in disbelief. My own body, a beautiful shell.
Almost instantly, I knew what Charon had done. He’d crafted me a new physical form. Just like he’d built Aion, with his own two hands. Somehow, impossibly, he’d even managed to give me flesh. But still, his creation… That vessel. It wasn’t a human body.
Charon’s work had been masterful. He’d even done his best to recreate my imperfections, human pores, the occasional, invisible scar. But the vessel emanated a power that terrified me, and its flesh seemed to glow from within.
Phonos’s screech was more than a way out of the Acheron. He was calling me. But if I followed his call, I wouldn’t be the Daphne Phonos had met. I wouldn’t be human.
Could Phonos even love me like that? He hadn’t even loved me before, not really.
“Is that really what you think, little seer?” the lake asked.
I didn’t know anymore. After that final, devastating vision, all my answers had been right in front of me. But now… What was I supposed to do, to say?
I’d felt Phonos’s love for me in our bond. It had been real. But I was so afraid.
The screech intensified, now a melody of such profound loss it vibrated through my very essence. And within the sound, fractured pieces of his soul bled through, vivid and unfiltered.
Daphne…
My name, a desperate, broken prayer.
Mine…
A possessive, primal claim that was not a demand, but an unchangeable fact.
Please… Not an ending…
A plea so raw, so stripped of all his pride and power, that it shattered my doubts and my resolve. Of course he’d never wanted a replacement. He wanted me.
“If you didn’t belong together, it wasn’t because of Callista,” the lake told me. “It was because you weren’t death-touched. Because your own fate wouldn’t have let you go.”
Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The difficult answers, the ones I’d missed. “Because I was marked for death from the beginning.”
In hindsight, it should have been so obvious to notice. I’d only ever been able to properly make my way to the lake once I’d found the flowers. Why had I ever believed I could stay in the city of the dead, unhindered and untouched by its power?
“You believed it, because you wanted to, and no one told you otherwise. But now, you don’t need to believe pretty lies. All you need to do…”
“Is to be brave.”
To venture into a new kind of existence. To reach back and embrace my bond with Phonos for a second time.
The threads of fate were never straightforward. I’d spent a lifetime trying to read them, to understand their tangled patterns, and I’d been a fool. I’d seen a single vision of Callista and let my own fear and jealousy twist the pattern into a knot of doubt.
I couldn’t let our story end this way.
As if sensing the shift in me, Phonos’s screech changed.
It was a song of grief and hope, of endings and beginnings, and it began to feel tangible.
It reminded me of a phantom embrace of feathers, a promise of warmth in the encroaching dark.
It was the same feeling from my vision, the one I’d yearned to reach for, the safety I’d desperately needed but had, in the end, failed to accept.
A sharp, biting chill erupted through me as my soul was slowly dragged from its peaceful state. A final, soft whisper filtered through the pain. “Go to your mate, little seer. And remember. You are free now.”
I braced myself and surged toward life, toward the pain, toward him. For once, it wasn’t silence that I sought, but the sound. The music of his breath and of his heart. I finally had my freedom, and this time, no one, not even fate, could take it away.
As the final notes of my screech died, silence slammed back into the workshop.
I sagged against the obsidian table, my throat raw, my lungs burning.
Every muscle in my body trembled with the aftershock of the power I’d unleashed.
I stared at her, at the perfect form on the stone, and despair began to settle in my bones.